How to Build an Email List in WordPress – Email Marketing 101

Building an email list is a hot topic among bloggers and small business owners. Just about every expert will tell you to build an email list, but most forget to cover common questions like what is an email list? why build an email list? how to build an email list in WordPress? etc. In this email marketing 101 guide, we will cover every aspect of email newsletters and WordPress. This includes the very basics to advanced tricks, recommended services & plugins, secret tips to increase opt-in rates, and much more.

Because this is a long article, we recommend that you follow the table of content below to navigate through the article.

Email Marketing 101

What is an Email List?

An email list consists of email addresses of users who have voluntarily signed up on your website to receive email updates in a newsletter or special announcement format. It allows you to stay in touch with your existing and potential customers on a regular basis (daily, weekly, monthly etc). You can send emails about exclusive news, product related announcements, or give special deals to your email newsletter subscribers.

Why Build an Email List?

On our websites, we have noticed that email outperforms social networks in the number of clicks. We have tested this repeatedly, and always got the same result. Emails got us 10 times more clicks than all social media combined.

Why email performed so well? The answer is simple: email is private and personal. If this is not a good enough reason to start building your email list, then we got plenty more.

Guaranteed Reach – When you use Twitter or Facebook, your statuses are bound to be missed due to the very nature of twitter/fb updates. However, people tend to check their emails a lot more carefully than their timelines on social networks.

Access and Ownership – You don’t own any data on Twitter or Facebook. At anytime, you can get your account suspended and lose all your followers. Or what if Twitter and FB goes away, not saying they will anytime soon, but email list is something that you can hold on to. Second, you are not limited to 140 characters. You set your limits yourself. You can integrate email newsletters within your WordPress blog a lot better than Facebook or Twitter (We will show you how later in this guide).

Better Targeting – The best part about email newsletters is that you can target it locally (for folks in specific countries, cities, states). If you are launching a product in select locations, then email is the best way to reach your subscribers in that location.

Increase Revenue – Bottom line is when you have guaranteed reach, better targeting, and attention of your users, then you are definitely going to increase revenue.

But what about social media? Isn’t email dead and social media is where everyone’s at?

If email was truly dead, then why does every social media website require you to have an email address before you sign up?

Email has been the most reliable form of electronic communication for the past two decades, and it hasn’t slowed down.

Building an email list is a lot easier than building a following on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+.

Facebook limits the reach of your pages to a small percentage of your followers. Similarly your tweets only appear for a limited time on a user’s timeline. On the other hand, when you send an email it reaches to all your subscribers and stays in their inbox until they take an action.

We are not saying that you should abandon social networks. Social networking sites are great for building user engagement, but email will bring you more visitors, conversions, and sales.

Lastly, a social media site can disappear or become less popular (remember Myspace?). When they disappear, they will take your followers with them. On the other hand email is around since the dawn of the internet, and it is still the most popular way people communicate on the internet.

How to Get Started With Your Email List Building?

The first thing that you need is a reliable email service provider. These companies specialize in email delivery, and you need them to ensure that your email reaches the inbox of all your subscribers (instead of having your email marked as spam).

These professional email service providers spend a lot of money and resources on their email delivery infrastructure to make sure that your email does not end up in your subscribers junk mail. All major companies like Facebook, Apple, eBay, etc use a third-party email marketing service.

Which Email Marketing Service Should You Use?

There are tons of great email marketing providers out there. It’s a very competitive industry which means companies are always trying to keep their costs low while offering a lot of features. Below are just some of the providers that we have work with and highly recommend.

The best part is that Constant Contact comes with a two month free trial. This gives you enough time to setup your email list and start capturing email addresses. By the end of the trial, your list will be paying for itself. Signup for FREE!

Note: You do have to pay after the trial period.

Aweber

Aweber is one of the most popular email service provider among bloggers and internet marketers. It lets you send emails, manage subscribers, and offer great tracking. Aside from that, you can also send sequence of automatically delivered emails (autoresponder), automatically create emails from your newest blog posts, and target subscribers based on their action, location, etc with a single click.

Lightbox popups are by far the highest converting signup forms you can place on your website.

We have successfully used lightbox popup on WPBeginner and noticed a 600% increase in our subscribers without affecting the user experience or any decrease in pageviews.

Our founder, Syed Balkhi, built a popular WordPress lead-generation plugin called OptinMonster that allows you to create WordPress lightbox popups.

The best part about OptinMonster is the exit-intent technology. This feature tracks user’s mouse behavior and only show them the popup at the precise moment they are about to leave. This has proven to be less intrusive and offers the best conversion.

You can also use OptinMonster to do A/B testing of your forms, show different forms on specific categories or pages, and much more.

If you’re someone who is a bit hesitant on using a popup on your site, then we have a challenge for you. Try it out for 14 days, and if you don’t increase your subscribers by huge numbers, then you can turn it off.

Folks are often surprised when they see the results. This is why OptinMonster is now being used on QuickBooks website, Michael Hyatt’s blog, and at many other reputable online sources.

You can easily add email signup forms to the floating bar to maximize the optin rate.

For those who don’t want to deal with following a tutorial and customizing HTML / CSS, then we have it built-in to OptinMonster.

Aside from getting pre-built designs that you can easily edit without writing any code, you also get full power of OptinMonster.

For example, if a user closes the bar, then you can choose to never show them the bar again for 30 days or any period that you desire. You can show different message on different categories, posts, or pages.

Footer bars convert a little bit less than popups, but they are still one of the better converting email signup forms on your site.

If you use OptinMonster vs another plugin, you will actually see the conversion data. While it’s fairly easy to create a footer bar (see tutorial above), it’s hard to collect data, run split tests, etc.

Slide-ins or Slide-ups

Slide-ins are forms that slide from the bottom right corner of your screen with an email signup offer. Unlike static sidebar forms, these get user’s attention and are considered to be less annoying than popups.

Business owners feel more comfortable with this form when compared to popups. While it gets decent conversion rate, it is no match for a popup.

Qualaroo and Drip come with monthly subscription plans, while OptinMonster comes with an annual fee.

Generic Sidebar and After Post Forms

It’s become a common practice to put an email signup form in the sidebar and after the post.

These forms usually get the lowest conversion, but most folks don’t realize it because these forms come built-in with the themes.

Due to popular demand, we have added the forms to OptinMonster mainly to allow users to split-test their message along with seeing the actual results, so you can see how well the sidebar forms and after post forms convert when compared to the other form types.

Contact Forms

While the title read contact forms, we are talking about any WordPress form in general so it includes: user signup forms, general contact form, request a quote form, submit a post form etc.

You can creatively add a checkbox in your form that says something like this “Yes I want to receive updates from WPBeginner”. We have seen this technique used in numerous big brand websites where they will have two checkboxes where one says, I agree with the Terms of Service and the other says sign me up for the updates. Normally coding this would be impossible for beginners. But it has been made easy with our favorite WordPress form plugin: WPForms.

With the WPForms drag and drop form builder, you can simply create as many forms you want, and use their Aweber, GetResponse, or MailChimp addons to have the opt-in option within your contact form. Note: This addon is available for their Plus & Pro plan, so Basic Plan users don’t get this addon.

We believe this is a great way to stay in touch with your clients, if you are a designer or consultant. It can be used in anyway you want, so sky is really the limit.

Hi,
I had my blog for 3 years now and decided to start an email list to send to my subscribers a newsletter. But I’m using the wordpress blog the free version (WordPress.com), how can I get my subscribers who decided to follow me to get their e-mail addresses to send them the newsletter? Or do I have to create an e-mail list and how do I put it on WordPress? Sorry I’m still new to this.

You guys did a fantastic job and share quality knowledge consistently. In this post, you have nicely explained that how to build an email list in WordPress, along with the spectacular recourses which help out individuals for successful email marketing campaigns

As we all know that collecting emails is the most significant part of this process OptinMonster make it easy for us to do so nicely and effectively.

I’m intrested in Integrating an email sign up Box on my checkout screen for my word press site. I actually had not thought of that before but it has come to the forefront with me right now because I’m having a problem with the site. The Box that they can check already exists which I was not aware of. What the problem is just the other day my website started having an internal server error as people tried to get to the payment screen. After playing around with-it for a little bit I found that if they check the Box it would move to the payment screen but if you don’t check the Box it gives the error message and I cannot figure out how to find and correct this issue . Please help.

Thanks for the information! I am wondering which version of WordPress is necessary in order to build an email list. I haven’t been able to find that information anywhere online. Right now I have the free version, and am wondering if my only option is upgrading to the 300$ business plan.

Once you have created your list, think of ways to stand out from the crowd. These days, inboxes are overflowing with emails and you do not want yours to be the ones sent to the trash folder. Use a unique template, offer discounts and always include calls to action so your list can keep growing and improving through time. By measuring the success rate of your campaign, you will know how big of a driving sales force it is and make the next one even better.

This is great EXCEPT that MailChimp and others REQUIRE posting your physical address! Yikes!!!! for a lifestyle blogger, I don’t want my address out there! Isn’t there any way to subscribe readers for free? All these other services cost $10-$20/month… I’m just writing! not making a dime!

Are you talking about the address seen at the bottom of the footer in your email? I deleted mine when I was designing my campaign newsletter. Just select the footer box, find your address in the side column and delete it.

Right now I have a free wordpress blog and am preparing to go self-hosted within the next few months. I’m trying to figure out if my wordpress followers count as email subscribers, as I’m trying to figure out which email provider to go through.

I am completely new to wordpress and am trying to set up a mailing list for my page. I have seen lots of discussions online on how to set up different tools, but my main question wasn’t even touched:

Where is all the data stored?

Do I need a mail provider to collect and store all the subscribers, or can I start with a free service and collect these adresses within my own system (i.e. wordpress) to have a free alternative for the start?

It seems the tools itself are not that expensive, the email providers are…

Usually, people think twice before signing up for a blog with daily post updates as they find daily updates in their inbox a bit frustrating. It is logical to give them different options like “Get Updates Daily” or “Get Updates Weekly” etc.

I really like the subscription form that you are using on the sidebar. Which plugin or service are you using for that? I suspect it is WPForms.

Depends on which email marketing software you are using. If you are using Constant Contact, then you just need to click on the create button to write your email and then send it right away or schedule it.

What about hosting your own email marketing service with plugins like “Email Newsletter” or “Newsletter”. Anyone have experience with it? Is it too complicated? I would think if you’re just starting out, it would be pretty easy to manage a small list on your own site. Just a thought.

If your site draws the general population, it matters less than if your site is scholarly or intense. People who will read for more than, say, ten minutes of information, are more likely to be turned off by pop-ups. I don’t use them because people are using my site as reference material. I don’t even have email capture because I don’t understand it, but that may explain part of how, with no promotion whatsoever, no SEO, my site draws a, to me, impressive number of repeat visitors.

It is one of the most comprehensive post on email marketing I ever read.
I think instead of trying the limited options of free MailChimp service one needs to get premium from the day one if he is really damn serious to build an email list and earn money easily.

OptinMonster is one of my tested email builder and its least irritating the visitor is the unique quality which a gem of blogger like Balkhi can develop.

Thanks a lot for sharing this wonderful post which I also share at social media to help my friends.

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About WPBeginner®

WPBeginner is a free WordPress resource site for Beginners. WPBeginner was founded in July 2009 by Syed Balkhi. The main goal of this site is to provide quality tips, tricks, hacks, and other WordPress resources that allows WordPress beginners to improve their site(s).